Formula 1

Formula 1 2014 season will commence this coming Friday, the first grand prix will be held in Australia and the season will end this November in Abu Dhabi.

For those who are not familiar or knows very little about formula 1, it’s not just racing between fast cars and teams, it’s about tactics too! 

It’s the most watched sport in the world (more than 525 million viewers a year) and there’s even a critical science behind the sport. Unlike let’s say Basketball, good luck seeing engineers or experts in aerodynamics and quantum mechanics in your favorite basketball team bench. And unlike Basketball, F1 contributes to the technology that your everyday car have, from safety to fuel efficiency and so much more. 

It is also one of the most expensive sport. Let’s compare it again with basketball, Miami Heat star Lebron James earns $19.07 million dollars a year compared to $40 million dollars a year of Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso. That said, Formula 1 drivers are super human. If you think that you can drive or let alone start the engine of a formula 1 car, I’m pretty sure that you cannot. F1 drivers sits (it’s not even sitting) very uncomfortably inside their cockpits a few inches above the pavement, soon they will feel incredible amounts of g-force that a normal person like you and me cannot take and they do this for a couple of hours during races and practices. 

Driving the car is the easy part, because for someone (lets say he is very talented) to be an f1 driver you need a team that will accept you, and for them to accept you must “pay” (bring sponsorship to the team) that is amounted to an incredible amount of money. So if you’re thinking if a Filipino can be a driver in formula 1, I say there would have to be a total of 10 Filipino NBA players before that happens. And if you’re thinking if hosting a Grand Prix is plausible for us Filipinos? Hosting a Grand Prix is expensive. Singapore allots $65 million for their GP, Abu Dhabi GP, $66 million and Malaysia GP $67 million (which I will attend this end of March). The Philippines doesn’t have structure to host this particular event, furthermore, our airports cannot take the additional load, maybe in the next life time, maybe.